EIC 2012, the European Identity and Cloud Conference, is history now. We had a week fully packed with a lot of great keynotes, sessions, panels, and workshops. For me, it definitely was the year in which the EIC was most influential to my own thinking. The reason for that was simply that we had a lot of very good panels and other types of sessions related to some research we published around EIC or are currently working on. The three key topics were:

The KuppingerCole IT Paradigm which we have described as a model for developing IT infrastructures and organization in a way that it is fit for the large changes we are facing, like Cloud Computing, the impact of Mobile Computing, and others.

The Open API Economy, a concept which Craig Burton had started writing about quite a while ago and which is fundamentally changing the way service providers, organizations, app providers, and even individuals will work together.

Life Management Platforms, a concept which goes well beyond the limited reach of most of today’s Personal Data Stores and Personal Clouds. It will fundamentally affect the way individuals share personal data and thus will greatly influence social networks, CRM (Customer Relationship Management), eGovernment, and many other areas.

These topics all are tightly related. Doing IT with focus on services and information security allows consuming services much more efficiently. The Open API Economy provides these services and is increasingly successful, with massive growth of available APIs and their use. Life Management Platforms will require organizations to deal differently with services that affect individuals – and individuals will be able to expose their personal data in a privacy-aware and secure way that they never have been able to before.

There are several KuppingerCole reports available around these topics – and we are working on new ones which will be published soon. Some of them will go into more detail. One of the documents will cover the consumer view on the Open API Economy. There will be more scenarios, looking at the impact of the KuppingerCole IT Paradigm for other areas of IT, like Access Governance, Enterprise GRC, or IT Service Management.

There will be research which looks on the changing economics for CRM and the impact Life Management Platforms will have there. There will be other research looking at the very interesting and promising economics of Life Management Platforms. And there will be research looking at how concepts like the Open API Economy and Life Management Platforms are essential to the “real world”, such as making the Connected Car/Vehicle really work.

However, EIC was for certainly not only about these new hot topics. An important topic at EIC, more down to earth, was modern architectures for IAM (Identity and Access Management). We’ve had interesting sessions around this topic, including a workshop focusing on whether, when, how and where to migrate legacy identity provisioning systems.

EIC again was a great mix of thought leadership and best practices, with some very interesting and well attended workshops on Friday. Organization for EIC 2013 Europe has begun. The conference will be again in May (instead of April). The details will be announced soon. But you should block mid May 2013 now for the next EIC.

It is its scale and interoperability that fundamentally differentiate the Internet of Things from existing isolated networks of various embedded devices. And this scale is truly massive. Extrapolating the new fashion of making each and every device connected, it is estimated that by 2020, the number of “things” in the world will surpass 200 billion and the IoT market will be worth nearly $9 trillion.